The patient lay confined to his bed, tied down by a failing heart and oxygen flowing constantly to the little prongs in his nose. He had lived a long, jolly life of faith and hard work. Here, on his last bed, he was luminous. His white hair, his translucent skin, his weakening laugh, all seemed lit from within. He died peacefully, amid family, when his time came. Not by suicide.

I’m a neurologist, and I know that death is hard and comes in all shapes and sizes. End-of-life care arouses strong emotions. But a small group of suicide advocates have increasingly dominated the California conversation on dying issues.

The Hemlock Society, re-branded as “Compassion and Choices,” has amassed a $22 million war chest, mostly from out-of-state figures like George Soros, for a three-pronged attack to pass physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in California: SB 128, a bill now moving to the state Assembly; a San Diego lawsuit saying physician-assisted suicide is already legal; and, if needed, a voter proposition. They believe the day for suicide has come.

Physician-assisted suicide means that you could find a doctor online, who would then examine you and a write a cheap prescription for an overdose of sleeping pills. You could take it the same day or anytime later when you felt ready. Sadly, your 12-year-old or anyone else could also find and take it.

SB 128 is flawed by a lack of safeguards. While claiming to limit PAS to patients with less than six months to live, this law provides complete legal immunity to the death doctor, with no mechanism for oversight or verification. PAS must be left off the death certificate and the only cases recorded will be those voluntarily reported by the doctor.

Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Canada have similar laws on physician-assisted suicide. We know stories of individuals getting PAS without a six-month prognosis, and we also know, at least in Oregon, that only a few doctors are doing the lion’s share of physician-assisted suicides. Instead of your family doctor sending you for an objective second opinion by a specialist, what really happens is that patients shop for a doctor who advocates PAS, who then gets a “second opinion” from another advocate who always agrees. In 2014, of the 105 cases reported in Oregon, only 2 percent got psychiatric evaluation for treatable depression. Without legal immunity, this would be malpractice.

SB 128 is both dangerous and unnecessary. Unnecessary because the Hemlock Society has been telling people how to commit suicide painlessly, without help, for decades. Dangerous because the doctor’s lethal prescription can have complications which go unreported under the shroud of secrecy covering physician-assisted suicide laws in other states. Our prison systems continue to botch executions, even with professional supervision. How can we send a sick, frightened patient home with a bottle of Nembutal, to die alone or with family, easily vomiting, choking or otherwise suffering?

In my experience, the family left behind suffers a range of emotions, including guilt and divisive anger. “You shouldn’t have let Mom go,” or “Did I do enough to let Mom know she really wasn’t a burden to us?” SB 128 fails to require family notification, much less any family therapy or reconciliation before the fatal swallow.

As our teens and young adults fight a rising tide of depression and suicide, what kind of message does it send to approve PAS? The state and doctors are telling you that suicide is legal and OK, it’s just a “choice.” Besides eroding the doctor-patient trust bond for all of us, legalizing physician-assisted suicide indirectly endangers our kids and other depressed, vulnerable people.

True “death with dignity” would make palliative/hospice care available for all Californians. The sensitive palliative care team involves family and friends, underscores the patient’s true human worth, and, when needed, can legally provide terminal sedation when suffering can’t be controlled.

Our representatives in the Assembly need your input now, to know how many Californians care on each side of this issue.

Grisolía, M.D., is a San Diego neurologist and is California director for the American Academy of Medical Ethics.

As a life-long progressive who is rapidly approaching Medicare age, I am dismayed by the apparent resignation of the political left to the sorry state of dying in America. Just when moral outrage and radical social change are called for, my fellow progressives have embraced physician-assisted suicide as their political response to needless suffering of seriously ill people. This isn’t liberalism; it’s nihilism.

This liberal embrace of hastened death is spreading rapidly. In California, a bill to legalize doctor-assisted suicide passed the state senate last Thursday and is headed for the state assembly. In common with similar legislation in over 20 states, it was authored and co-sponsored by Democratic lawmakers touting civil liberties as their motivation.

In the 1970s this scenario was the stuff of dystopic sci-fi. Remember Soylent Green? A society decides it doesn’t have the resources or will to take good care of aging and dying people, but offers them a compassionately quick, painless and aesthetically pleasing death. Edward G. Robinson’s death scene in this 1973 movie (filmed while the actor was dying of cancer) is essential viewing for anyone who supports physician-assisted suicide.

In the 1970s and 1980s progressives championed hospice as a counter-cultural response to woefully bad care of terminally ill people. To good effect: Hospice and the specialties of palliative medicine and geriatrics demonstrated conclusively that much better care of frail elders and dying people is feasible and affordable. Meticulous communication and planning, skillful treatment of pain and other symptoms, support for patients and families in caring for themselves and 24-7 availability of professional help are all far less expensive than the current norm—in which no one attends to such details, while doctors forestall death at all costs. As a consequence, one in five people languish in intensive care units during their final days.

Dying is rarely easy, but it doesn’t have to be this hard. Having worked as a physician in hospice and palliative care teams since 1978, I know that no one needs to die in physical agony. With comprehensive whole person care, most people live in relative comfort and, despite the sadness of leaving those they love, even a sense of wellbeing during their final months, weeks and days of life.

For years it seemed like we were on a path to a future in which every person could be assured of comfort and having their dignity honored through the very end of life. Unfortunately, countervailing forces, chief among them the profit motive, supervened. Instead of transforming mainstream health care to become genuinely person-centered, hospice, palliative medicine and geriatrics are largely being absorbed within corporatized medicine. For instance, fully two-thirds of America’s hospices now belong to for-profit companies, many traded on Wall Street.

It’s great that more people receive hospice care than ever before, but quality has suffered. Across the hospice industry, the average number of dying patients assigned to each nurse has risen to untenable levels. Meanwhile, the industry’s capacity to provide continuous hospice care in people’s homes has all but disappeared, resulting in needless brink-of-death hospitalizations, avoidable pain and suffering and unnecessary costs. This is no surprise to liberals: the fiscal wellbeing of corporations too often takes precedence over the wellbeing of the people they serve.

Despite having the resources and technical know-how to reliably care well for people through the end of life, a persistent public health crisis surrounds the way we die. The public’s fear, anger and distrust are, tragically, well founded. But authorizing doctors to intentionally end peoples’ lives is nothing more than capitulation to this pervasive social irresponsibility.

An authentic, socially sound solution to this crisis is readily achievable if we can muster the will to demand it. A tectonic shift in the way healthcare is paid for—from financially rewarding quantity of services to measured quality of care delivered—has the potential to improve care for seriously ill people in transformative ways. This change began with RomneyCare, went national with ObamaCare, and will be accelerated by the “doc fix” legislation that Congress just passed and the president quickly signed.

Under these laws, accountable care and value-based payments will increasingly tie physicians’ Medicare fees to the quality of clinical outcomes and people’s satisfaction with the health care they receive. For end-of-life care, recognized quality measures include where people died and relatives’ perceptions of whether or not their loved ones’ values and preferences were elicited and honored.

This is no time to be fatalistic. Instead, it’s time to push major redesign of physician education and post-graduate training. State legislators could write bills to require medical and nursing schools and residency programs to adequately train clinicians in personalized symptom management, communication and shared decision-making, and collaborative team-based care.

Legislators could mandate performance tests of basic skills in these areas before their state awards licenses to practice medicine.

Many corporate nursing homes today are little more than human warehouses. The wages and staffing levels of aides are so low that physically dependent people are destined to feel undignified. State legislatures could compel nursing home companies to employ enough nurses and aides to answer the bell when a physically dependent person—someone’s grandparent, mother or father—needs help in getting to a bathroom.

State-sponsored websites could provide easily accessible and reliable quality ratings of hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and home health and hospice programs, helping to align market forces with public health priorities. Medicare’s star ratings of nursing homes, while far from perfect, are having a noticeably positive impact on quality of long-term care.

I’ve been making this case to state legislators who sponsor or support legalizing assisted suicide, almost all of whom are Democrats. I get a lot of “yes-but” responses: Yes but, you’ll never get doctors to practice the way you describe. The less polite refer to entrenched interests in the status quo and financial pipelines of the medical-industrial complex. Without disputing my premise, one senior blue state senator recently told me I was naïve to think anything substantial would change.

He sounded depressed, but I couldn’t let him off the hook. I pointed out that if the physician-assisted suicide bill he supports becomes law, his mother’s internist will still not have been adequately trained or have the skills needed to treat her pain or breathlessness. He will be no better at listening to her concerns or counseling her through the difficult, but normal, process of leaving this life. He will, however, be able to write her a lethal prescription.

What about this is good government?

It is said that the real worth of any society can be found in the way it cares for its most vulnerable members. In Oregon, Washington, Vermont, New Mexico and Montana where doctors can legally write lethal prescriptions, the systemic deficiencies that cause preventable distress among dying people persist. A healthy society doesn’t force its members to choose between suffering and suicide. I grew up believing that every person’s life has value and that America does not settle for less than the best. Suicide is not the answer. We are a far more generous people than that. Aged, ill and dying Americans need progressives to reclaim our commitment to bold, constructive political and social action.

Californians Against Assisted Suicide Vows Continued Opposition to SB 128 As It Moves to the Assembly

Sacramento, CA – On a narrow vote, the California State Senate voted to move SB 128, a bill permitting doctor assisted suicide, forward to the State Assembly. The legislation faced stiff opposition from both Democratic and Republican members of the Senate.

“Unfortunately, this vote sends the message to patients like me that suicide is the preferred option. I have a great family and strong community support, but I can’t imagine how people facing a life-limiting diagnosis will hear this message from the State Senate,” noted opponent Stephanie Packer, a Southern California 32-year old mother of 4 who was given a terminal diagnosis.

One of the leaders from the disability rights community advocating against assisted suicide is Marilyn Golden, Senior Policy Analyst for the Berkeley-based Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. “We recognize that opposing assisted suicide has never been a partisan issue and have always known this legislative battle in California would be a long one. This bill is simply about protecting doctors and HMOs from liability and tellspeople with disabilities who face a terminal diagnosis, that may well prove inaccurate, that there is no dignity in our lives. Assisted suicide is dangerous and we are going to bring that message loud and clear to every member of the State Assembly and the Governor.”

Senate Bill 128 remains opposed by a broad group of organizations including the Association of Northern California Oncologists, Disability Rights California, the California Foundation for Independent Living, the Medical Oncology Association of Southern California, the Alliance of Catholic Healthcare, the California Disability Alliance, The Arc of California and dozens of others.

Similar bills have already been defeated or tabled this year in states like Connecticut, Delaware and Colorado. New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan (D) vetoed a bill Tuesday for an assisted suicide study committee on the issue, writing that she believed “... the goals of this bill begin to take New Hampshire down a precarious path.” The New Jersey State Assembly moved a bill on assisted suicide last year to the State Senate; that bill has also received significant opposition and has drawn concerns from Governor Christie.

Sacramento, CA - Several prominent African-American clergy leaders are asking California legislators to say no to Senate Bill 128 - assisted suicide. These pastors represent a larger group of African-American congregations in Southern California that are staunchly opposed to assisted suicide legalization and SB 128.

This leadership group includes Rev. Norman Copeland, Senior Pastor of St. Paul A.M.E. Church in San Bernardino, and the board chairman of CLUE Los Angeles (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice). Also asking legislators to say no to Senate Bill 128 is Bishop Philip Powell, Senior Pastor of The Centre at Highland and President of the Inland Empire Concerned African American Churches, and Pastor Kerwin Manning, Senior Pastor of Pasadena Church and president of the Clergy Community Coalition.

These pastors together represent several dozen largely African-American congregations in the Los Angeles and Inland Empire areas of Southern California.

"This community understands that assisted suicide mixed with a lack of access to healthcare resources in many largely African American communities is a recipe for disaster," said Ken Barnes, spokesperson for the Californians Against Assisted Suicide coalition. "California is not Oregon, Washington or Vermont, we are a far more ethnically and economically diverse state. Many of the communities these clergy leaders serve face hospital closures, lack of primary care facilities and virtually non-existent palliative and hospice care options. These items should be legislative priorities, not assisted suicide."